William James and 18th-century anthropology

William James and emotion: is a century of fame worth a century of misunderstanding?

During his lifetime William James's complex ideas about emotion were oversimplified to the point of caricature, and for the next half century scientific research on emotion was driven by the oversimplified version--by the idea that emotions are merely the sensation of bodily changes. In fact, the interpretation of the stimulus was an essential feature of James's ideas, but one that seemed so ob...

Chronicle of Datura Toxicity in the 18th and 19th Century

Background: Datura stramonium is a poisonous and common flowering plant that is a member of the Solanacae family. Datura poisonings are a rare occurrence in the 21st century, making toxicological information on this plant sparse. Historical information on Datura provides useful information on the clinical symptoms and characteristics of poisonings. This review looks at the state of knowledge on...

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE William James Symposium WILLIAM JAMES AND HYPNOSIS; A Centennial Reflection

Like many other early psychologists, William James was fascinated by hypnosis and related phenomena. For James, hypnosis was both an experimental technique for creating divisions of consciousness, and a laboratory model of naturally occurring disorders of awareness. James' treatment of consciousness in hypnosis presages contemporary interests in dissociation and implicit cognition, and undersco...

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (review)

William James on the Self

In the late nineteenth century William James pieced together a theory of self that is remarkably modern, some might say 'post-modern.' In Chapter X of his magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology (1890), entitled "The Consciousness of Self," James discusses the manifold nature of the self treating it in its native complexity. Among other things, he proposes a notion of identity and experience ...